Unsure about MNsure

The State of Minnesota has spent over $150 million to develop the MNsure website and call center to handle Minnesotans’ purchase of health insurance as part of Obamacare’s state “exchanges.”

The State recently spent nearly $5 million more to have Deloitte consultants test and audit MNsure. They found that almost two-thirds (47 out of 73) of the essential MNsure system functions are not operating properly or at all, that many haven’t even been defined yet, and that several critical functions are unlikely to be operational by the November 2015 deadline.

These problems include the inability to handle changes in enrollee circumstances, the inability of enrollees to review Minnesota Care or Medicaid coverage, and the inability of enrollees to renew their policies.

As a former IT project manager, I cannot imagine that we would have to pay someone to test the system a year after it had been released to the public, or that it would be so utterly incomplete and “buggy.” These problems mean a very costly delay of the transition of 800,000 people who are currently enrolled in Medicaid and MinnesotaCare into the new MNsure system until it can be fixed.

District 57B Rep. Anna Wills, R-Apple Valley, is a health care provider and cares about the thousands of people impacted by the severely botched implementation of MNsure, and supports market-based solutions that give people more choices in managing their health care.